What overdiagnosis looks like
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine talks about screening for thyroid cancer in South Korea. There has been a massive increase in diagnosis, mostly of very small tumours that are probably harmless — there was been no change in the thyroid cancer deaths.
As the authors say:
Thyroid-cancer surgery has substantial consequences for patients. Most must receive lifelong thyroid-replacement therapy, and a few have complications from the procedure. An analysis of insurance claims for more than 15,000 Koreans who underwent surgery showed that 11% had hypoparathyroidism and 2% had vocal-cord paralysis.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »